MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS LIBRARY: ANNUAL REPORT, July 1 2011‐June 30 2012 Prepared by John Wagstaff, with assistance from Kirstin Dougan, David Butler and Nancy Taylor General The University of Illinois’ School of Music underwent its once‐a‐decade reaccreditation by the National Association of Schools of Music in spring 2012. The Music & Performing Arts Library was visited as part of this re‐accreditation, so it seems appropriate to begin this report with a summary of the comments made – these can be found below. But most of all, of course, I am happy once again to open this report by acknowledging the commitment of MPAL’s staff members, including our student workers, to providing the best possible service in the face of several service‐ and environmentally‐based obstacles. We had some disappointments during the year (of which more below), and such things always have an adverse effect on morale. This report is divided into: 
Comments on the library derived from the 2012 NASM report to the School of Music 
Major activities and accomplishments of our unit 
Significant changes to unit operations, personnel, service profile, or service programs 
Issues of concern relating to physical facilities, and to IT 
Our statistical profile Each of these areas is discussed individually below. Comments on the library derived from the 2012 NASM report to the School of Music The report, prepared by Kristin Thelander (University of Iowa School of Music), Thomas Novak (New England Conservatory), and Jamal Rossi (Eastman School of Music), made the following comments in regard to the Music & Performing Arts Library. Professors Novak and Rossi were the committee members chosen to visit the library as part of the reaccreditation exercise. Report, p. 7: “There appear to be facilities and potential health and safety issues in the library.” Report, p. 8, “Library and learning resources” section. “The MPAL maintains a large and comprehensive collection of books, sound and video recordings, scores , and serial publications that appears sufficient to support the size, scope, and mission of the School of Music. .. There exist multiple cooperative arrangements including the I‐Share consortium, membership in the Center for Research Libraries, and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation… The MPAL seems to be adequately staffed by two professional librarians, eight support‐staff members, two graduate assistants, and fourteen student assistants. The head librarian is commended for what appears to be a well‐run library. The library hours (72 hours per week during the semesters) appear to meet the needs of the faculty and students. As noted above, the MPAL is housed on two floors within the School of Music. While the size of the library seems adequate for the collection (nearly 23,000 square feet), and the facility easily accessible to students and faculty, the space appears to be in need of refurbishment. The furniture, lighting, and general esthetics of the library appear to date from the 1970s. Electric outlets have been added through the library to support computers at tables and workstations, however this appears to have resulted in wire mold on walls, shelving units, and the floors. There are numerous instances where the suspended ceiling is sagging, and a large area where the ceiling tiles have been removed completely in order to be utilized as replacement tiles for more public areas of the library. The FY11 budget for the library, $181,465, appears adequate to maintain general operations of the library. The Self‐Study indicates that the MPAL receives 1.06% of the University of Illinois Library’s acquisitions budget, yet the student enrollment of the School of Music accounts for 1.88% of the university’s student population (SS p. 50). It is also worth noting that the MPAL budget appears to be below that of peer institutions. The inability of the budget to keep up with the rate of inflation for library materials appears to have diminished the collection‐building capacity of the MPAL.” Finally, Section Q of the report, under ”School of Music Strengths,” mentions “An excellent, well‐staffed music library”, which is encouraging. Major activities and accomplishments of our unit FY12 was another interesting year following on our achievements in FY11 (including our first “research showcase”, a very successful event that we will be repeating in late spring 2013). Perhaps our most significant achievement was in continuing to build upon our good relations with the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. This has resulted in monthly LibGuides that link performances being given each month at the Krannert Center with information on materials in MPAL that relate to those performances. The guides can be found at: http://www.library.illinois.edu/mux/research/KCPAGuides.html The guides, and the idea behind them , were the brainchild of Kirstin Dougan. Krannert is now beginning to mention the guide in its monthly publicity materials, and the guide was also mentioned in recent issues of Inside Illinois, thanks to the Library Marketing Grant we won. Having this relationship with Krannert is clearly going to raise the profile of the library. Practicum student Rachel Cohen, studying for a master’s in the Department of Theatre, undertook several useful projects while she was with us in spring 2012. These included a survey of the needs and opinions of theatre faculty and students, and we will be following up on the survey results in the hope of making improvements to what we can offer to this constituency. Another of our practicum students, Stacey Snyder (this time on a reference practicum) put together a list of film music resources that will help us assess and build our collections in this area. During early summer 2012 we employed music graduate student Emily Wuchner to work on several projects, including one to discover how many of the video performances that we currently have in VHS format are also available on DVD – our patrons prefer this format and are allowed to check DVDs out of the library, whereas VHS tapes do not circulate. Emily also helped with a major overhaul of our LibGuides, checking and updating links that needed to be changed due to the change from ORR to SFX. Gifts and other acquisitions Our gift funds continue to grow at a slower rate than previously, though they did show a small increase overall in FY12. We added $4,012 to fund mus17 (as against $3,351 in FY11), and $1,703 to fund mus18 (compared with $2,040 in FY11). We continue, too, to make good progress on processing music special collections materials. Graduate Assistant Jessica Lapinsky worked hard on processing the Robert E. Brown Collection of World Music materials, after a frustrating period of many years during which nothing could be done with this collection because of the absence of a deed of gift. Although a few boxes of material remain, this collection is now basically dealt with – the end of a very long chapter that began over five years ago. John Wagstaff worked on revising MPAL’s Collection Development policies, which will include a revised section on gifts. Exhibits Thanks to our wonderfully creative staff and students we were able to mount several high‐quality exhibits this year, including The history of Motown records; Music in the movies; Women’s History Month; and US election campaign songs. In July 2012 the School of Music welcomed the two‐yearly meeting of the North American British Music Studies Association to campus, and the library put together an extensive exhibit in connection with this event. Significant changes to unit operations, personnel, service profile, or service programs Staff changes There were no changes to our regular staff this year, although we will have to cope with the loss of a Graduate Assistant position in FY13 due to sufficient funds not being available in the Lawrence King GA fund. We hope that there will be enough in the King fund to allow us to reinstate this GA position in FY14. As our library continues to deal with large amounts of traffic at the circulation and reference desks, our staff deserve great credit for their work, often conducted under time and other pressures. Education presentations, reference activity, etc. In spite of the many scheduling and staffing difficulties we faced, we still managed to offer a high number of induction and education sessions to students in FY12: 30 presentations to 671 students was very creditable. Credit is again due to Kirstin Dougan for her work in this area. In addition to our regular audiences of music students, we offered several sessions to students of the Department of Dance and Department of Theatre. Outreach to the Department of Theatre (in particular) has been steadily increasing over the past couple of years, and anecdotal evidence suggests that students from this department are coming to see us in greater numbers. Other staffing matters As usual we are grateful for the work of our graduate assistants this year. GAs Amanda (Mandi) Goodsett and Jessica Lapinsky made major contributions: Jessica (whom we shared with the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music) left us in summer 2012, and Mandi will be continuing until May 2013 (Mandi is now our “job‐share” with Sousa, and works for 10 hours per week in both units. We only have one GA for the academic year 2012‐13, due to shortage of funds in the Lawrence King Fund.) Scott Schwartz of the Sousa Archives continues to offer MPAL GA’s tremendous support in the area of special collections training. Issues of concern related to the unit’s physical facilities The main cause for concern, highlighted in the School of Music’s NASM re‐accreditation report above, continues to be our library environment – especially the state of the library ceiling, which sags in places, is dirty, and has several holes where tiles have been removed to replace those in other, more public, areas. It was very disappointing that a potential bid in January 2012 for funds from the Library/IT fee to improve the look and the facilities of MPAL Library came to nothing, especially as the results of a survey we undertook in order to find out what our patrons wanted revealed that a majority of them considered that our library space “needs improvement”. Furthermore, it seems appropriate to repeat last year’s comment that “some of our library furniture (chairs and tables) looks dated, and takes away from the fact that we are one of the best music libraries in the US. Having some new study tables and chairs, including a few of the large armchairs that are now to be seen on 2nd floor of the Main Library, would improve the library’s environment considerably.” Two other things that came out of our January 2012 Space Survey, organized by Kirstin Dougan, was that our patrons strongly want the library to provide some group study rooms; and want to be able to browse our media shelves of CDs and DVDs, which at the moment are on closed access. Putting CDs and DVDs on open access is a project we have been thinking about for a while. Issues of concern related to information technology available to users of the unit I wrote last year that “Our biggest problem during the year, and one that definitely caused frustration to our patrons, was the continuing issue of the non‐printing of files in LibPrint.” That continued to be the case in 2011‐2012, although by the academic year’s end PaperCut (the replacement for LibPrint) promised improvements. Time will tell. Other issues of concern relate to the fact that (i) outside of the Undergraduate Library, Apple computers are not available or supported; and (ii) none of MPAL’s public terminals has any music scorewriting software, such as Sibelius or Finale. Most, if not all, of the music libraries in the CIC and outside it provide access to such software as a matter of course. In addition, the School of Music is a strongly Mac‐
based school, so we are behind the curve on this issue. Review of our goals for FY12, and goal‐setting for FY13 The majority of our goals for FY13 are broadly similar to those for FY12, i.e.: 1. Continue to develop the 3‐subject “Music and Performing Arts Library” concept so that the library becomes an essential resource and meeting place for students and Faculty from all three disciplines. Review: This exercise continues to go well. We are still making good in reaching out to dance and theatre faculty and students, who formerly had not always been as well served as music students and faculty. It is pleasing to see good numbers of library visits by dance and theatre patrons. 2. Continue to make our special collections visible, by providing more detailed information about these collections on our website, and more finding aids and catalog records as appropriate. Review: We still hope to dispose of materials from the Hunleth Collection (a collection of music purchased when the Hunleth Music Store in St Louis closed in the 1970s, and stored since then, uncataloged, in the Illinois University Press building) in the coming years. We continue to work closely with the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music to get other collections processed: sharing a Graduate Assistant with SACAM is a very useful arrangement for us. Our Music Special Collections Group, consisting of Tom Teper, Scott Schwartz, Bill Maher, and John Wagstaff, continues to work very well. We did not, however, get any materials from our collections digitized this year. 3. Work on making our media collections (CDs and DVDs) more visible. Review: at the time of writing we have been unable to move any of our CDs/DVDs into more public areas of the library. Nevertheless this remains a medium‐term goal. 4. Continue to expand and develop user guides and classroom instruction sessions. Review: see above, under “Educational presentations”. We have made excellent progress in this area, though of course there is always work still to be done. 5. Continue to work with CAM to ensure cataloging of MPAL materials in a timely and efficient manner. Review: We are grateful to members of CAM, especially our “on‐site” catalogers, for getting material onto our shelves this year. 6. Continue to contribute to the development of music, dance, and theatre librarianship through our presence at professional meetings, and by contributions to the professional literature. Review: John Wagstaff is a member of the Theatre Library Association, and is listowner of TLA‐L, the Association’s listserv. He also closely follows the Dance Librarian Group’s listserv, DLDG‐L. We were, unfortunately, again not able to attend any professional meetings of dance or theatre librarians this year. This is something else we need to improve upon. 7. Continue to contribute to the achievement of the library’s strategic goals. Review: Insofar as items 1‐6 on this list contribute to the library’s strategic goals (and we believe they do), we hope we have made an appropriate contribution in this direction. 8. The Music & Performing Arts Library has been in existence in its current form since 2008. We plan to go through an assessment exercise in 2012‐13 with a view to finding out from our patrons how useful (or otherwise) bringing the three collection areas of music, dance, and theatre together has been. We shall be calling on the library’s recently‐appointed Assessment Coordinator, Jen‐Chien Yu, for advice on how best to carry out this assessment. 9. We are planning a “Media stacks party” in FY13. At present our CD and DVD collection is not openly accessible to patrons, so we want to give them a “behind the scenes” look at the collections, combining this with a social event. Statistical profile 1. Facilities Seating At tables: 91 At carrels: 60 At public workstations: 17 At index tables: 5 In group study rooms: 6 Informal/other: 10 2. Personnel Faculty positions: Kirstin Dougan (100%) John Wagstaff (100%) Staff positions: William Buss (100%) David Butler (100%) Chris Pawlicki (100%) Gail Schmall (50%) Nancy Taylor (49%) Graduate assistants Amanda Goodsett (25%) (August 2011‐May 2012) Jessica Lapinsky (25%) (August 2011‐May 2012; shared position with the Sousa Archives) Emily Wuchner (25% graduate hourly position, May‐August 2012) 3. User Services The following data will be generated by the Office of User Services, but please report any additional data that is collected within the unit and is not reflected in centrally collected data.  Gate Count or Head Count (as reported during FY12 Sweeps Week, or actual for units maintaining continuous statistics).  Circulation o Initial and renewal. o Reserves. o Manual (if applicable) – Report using the web form at: https://illinois.edu/fb/sec/1804189 o Other (if available) 
Reference (as reported during FY12 Sweeps Week, or actual for units maintaining continuous statistics) o Face‐to‐face o Digital o Please note that we use DeskTracker year round in several locations, i.e. offices, circulation terminals 1 and 2, and the reference desk. That’s all we would want to add in this section. Manual issues: 204 Number of hours open to the public per week: Summer II 2011: 56 hours per week Fall 2011: 75.5 hours per week [3 hours gained over FY11] Spring 2011: 75.5 hours per week [3 hours gained over FY11] Summer I 2012: 40 hours per week Number of students involved in independent studies or practicum experiences supervised by unit faculty or staff: (1) Madeline Hosanna, reference practicum student supervised by Kirstin Dougan, spring semester 2012. (2) Rachel Cohen, theatre practicum with John Wagstaff, spring semester 2012. (3) Stacey Snyder, reference practicum student supervised by Kirstin Dougan, fall semester 2011. Credit course rubric and name for any credit‐bearing courses taught by unit faculty or staff: John Wagstaff (LIS530ALE – Music Librarianship and Bibliography) (15 students) (Spring 2012) Number of presentations to groups: We offered 30 sessions to a total of 671. We continue to try to particularly increase our outreach to students in theatre and dance. 4. Collection management (Cataloging) Totals: Monograph new titles: 1,193 Monographs new items: 1,316 Serials new titles: 210 Serials new items: 238 Scores new titles: 869 Scores new items: 924 Manuscripts new items/titles: 6 Sound recordings new titles: 658 Sound recordings new items: 692 DVDs new titles: 203 DVDs new items: 223 Computer files new items/titles: 1 Kits new items/titles: 7